Funny its not 7 years too late. The question is why a high ranking person like Ingo Molnar is now directly taking interest.

7 years ago Linux desktop due to technical road blocks was unable to make progress. This includes the following.

Closed business network protocols like MAPI. Closed document formats like Doc. Html website being built only for windows. On and On and On. With technical issues that are going to stop you dead trying to use a Linux desktop.

So 7 years ago resources forced into embed and server side was the correct thing to-do.

The list goes on. Now that all those road blocks are gone. Now looking at why the Linux desktop cannot progress is worth effort.

At worst is 3 year late starting to talk about this. All the other road blocks had to be cracked open first.

Jesus fucking god Ohio Ham. Go peddle that shit somewhere else. Linux is a butt-fuckiing abortion of an OS. Everyone knows it, it is just that nerd-tards like you are too wrapped up in it to notice. Try actually USING the pile of shit as a user for once. IT SUCKS!

Sorry you cannot comment on this stuff unless you have background about the person making the comment. That Linux Hater is always to lazy to get.

You are beyond stupid, Ham. Linux is supposed to be a meritocracy. It precisely shouldn't matter WHO you are, as long as you deliver. So it's not important who Ingo Molnar is or is not, or what he does or does not for a living. His analysis is for the most part spot-on.

Having just finished his immigration paper work, Petrus inhales a deep breath of the salty morning breeze rolling off the Sea of Ghosts and starts the long hike up the hill from the docks near Solitude to the City proper.

Briefly pausing his climb to study a blue butterfly fluttering over an aptly named red mountain flower, our hero is accosted by a guard, "No Lollygaggin'"

*sigh* "Yes, Lawman, sir."

Muttering to himself about a police state on the long climb past the city's stable, he ignored the simplistic majesty of the Solitude city gates but was relieved to have reached them without further incident.

Any relief he felt upon entering his new home town was lost instantly as he realized that he was about to witness to an execution.

Something struck him as horribly wrong with this scene. Moving closer to get a better view, he decided he knew what was wrong, the executioner was holding the axe wrong.

"You hold axe wrong! You idiot need hold axe right to cut neck through one stroke!"

"I'm going to have to ask you to step back, citizen!" a guard intoned. "Interrupting an execution is a serious offense."

"You idiot, hold axe all wrong!"

"That's it!"

The guards drew their weapons as Petrus stood in slack jawed horror as his well intentioned, but downright offensive mannerisms had driven the city guard to attack him. It barely registered to him that a steel greatsword had just slit open his belly like an old woman's purse.

LOL"Linux is supposed to be a meritocracy. It precisely shouldn't matter WHO you are, as long as you deliver."

This is correct and incorrect.

Rank in meritocracy is formed over time based on what you have delivered in the past. There is a tree based struct of authority inside the kernel.

So the Linux kernel is not a strict meritocracy. Tree like struct is required to reduce the amount of traffic going to Linus.

Treenew and releases maintainers (Linus and others).Linux Next tree maintainer where most patches go before going to Linus.Subssytem maintainers who feed to Next maintainer and Linus.Driver maintainers who mostly feed to Subsystem maintainersThen new people with no rank.

Ingo Molnar falls into subsystem maintainer level. That is not a simple rank to get.

When it comes to the format of distrobutions what Greg Kroah-Hartman says does not matter any more. Did you miss that he is now at the Linux Foundation not SUSE.

When Greg Kroah-Hartman was still at SUSE he had some effect with this problem since he could effect where SUSE was going. So Greg Kroah-Hartman is removed from the game.

So March 17, 2012 11:09 PM is a complete out the loop idiot. Who does not know where Linux staff are or how the Linux kernel power structs are designed. If you are going to throw names up get them right.

Power of Ingo Molnar is that he is high inside Redhat as well. So he is in the exact right place to talk to people controlling the future of Redhat a distribution.

These are the people you need speaking to change things.

Ingo Molnar one of those to control the redhat tree.

Other parties you would like to hear talking about this is the debian committee for the direction of debian. Then Ubuntu leads.

SUSE is fairly much out the game. 1/3 that are required to change is talking.

"Closed business network protocols like MAPI. Closed document formats like Doc. Html website being built only for windows."

Funny. I got DOC specifications from Microsoft over a decade ago. I even talked about it with some people constantly complaining about "doc is closed, no specs available, we have to guess everything, we can't do it!" but nothing happened. The whining went on and on and on. So I stopped. It was just people seeking for an excuse.

So let's not make any more excuses. Linux is flawed and shattered in so many ways and it's sad that they're just now starting to realize it. I welcomed Linux to the 21st century a couple of years ago in some things, but it'll probably take some years before they're even near the 2010's. Maybe in 10 years...

I unwrap a chocolate croissant, make a fresh cup of tea and settle down to work; a quick hg pull -u && make to start the recompile, then ctrl-x to my editor tab and carry on coding while the rebuild happens. Ctrl-X is my screen’s ‘hotkey’; it defaults to Ctrl-A but on a wireless keyboard that leaves unicode characters in the terminal

You never got the DOC specification 10 years ago. Not a complete one at least.

Even the current day DOC specification has holes in it. Filling in the gaps take time particularly when different versions of MS Office fill the holes differently.

Closed spec in areas that MS does not give you what they do so you have to reverse it out.

Reversing takes time.

The thing is today most of the closed formats are reverse far enough that things can work.

Yes how Microsoft has prevented competition is providing incomplete specs. Then doing stuff that breaks what has been done in the past by own programs so causing more reversing without good reasons.

Microsoft is no angel here. Its not only Linux that has been effected by this so as OS X. Yes the reason why OS X default tools for a long time had trouble handing DOC files was the quality of the DOC spec from Microsoft being crap.

Bias market Linux was not going to win no matter how good of a desktop was made. So the Linux world did not really bother focusing on it.

2012 most of those bias problems are fixed. Now focus the finer points can start.

Sorry the facts screw you over. If you had used the specs fully you would have known the 10 year old doc specs were defective.

>Bias market Linux was not going to win no matter how good of a desktop was made. So the Linux world did not really bother focusing on it.

Really? So what about the steady stream of companies that promised to make desktop Linux prominent (Red Hat, Linspire, Mandrake, Xandros, Canonical, ...) and then proceeded to either go bankrupt or shift their attention away to server or fade away into near oblivion?

Even if people started to listen to this guy, who sort of seems to know what he's talking about, it wouldn't matter. Here's how the timeline would go (just shift the dates as necessary):

2012-3-20: prominent developers from major FOSS projects agree to organize a conference to deal with the problem.

2012-6-30: conference is organized, to be held in Reykjavik (because there's a single interested person who lives there) on December 27 (so as not to interfere with anyone's schedules).

2012-12-27: conference begins. 2/3 of the prominent developers who organized the conference are not there because it's two days after Christmas. Attendance among other freetards is practically nil because -- let's face it -- it's Reykjavik in the middle of winter.

2012-12-30: conference ends. Committees have been proposed to deal with perceived problems. Overlap between perceived problems as held by the conference and those pointed out in this article is approximately 25%, but it's still better than nothing.

2013-1-2: Linux kernel devs publicly refuse to assist in any committees, because they don't see the problem.

2013-1-5: Torvalds finally pauses from Kernel hacking long enough to catch up on the news, publishes an e-mail saying the other kernel devs are fucking insane for dismissing this project, promises to help out, joins 3 committees at once, is never heard from by any of the committees again.

2013-1-15: first instance of ego-fueled fight which stops a committee from doing any useful work. (There will be at least 10 of these during the year.)

Unsurprisingly, the second half of the comment got eaten AGAIN. Dammit, Google, I thought you had at least fixed THIS problem.

2013-1-31: first instance of a committee which publishes some speculative documents, agrees to come back later, and never publish anything or meet ever again. (At least 1/3 of the committees will eventually do this.)

2013-7-15: first committee meet-up held in Tucson, Arizona. Practically no attendance because it's Tucson Arizona in the middle of the summer. (Also because Arizona is filled with racist imbeciles, so 50% of devs are afraid that if they show up, they'll get arrested for "driving while foreign".)

2013-12-27: second conference, held in Munich. Better attendance. Could actually solve problems, but ego-fueled fights break out and so nothing gets done.

2015-3-1: publication of recommendations of committees. Mostly unworkable, but what about Linux is not?

2015-3-10: half of major FOSS projects announce that they will not be implementing recommendations. Objections are not because the recommendations are unworkable, but because devs refuse to admit that problems exist.

2015-4-1: Kernel team announces that they will be implementing all relevant recommendations.

2015-4-2: Kernel team announces that, no, that was not an April Fool's Day joke, just bad timing.

2015-6-15: First version of new Kernel is released.

2015-6-16: Linux kernel forked because 75% of freetards don't want a kernel which makes it easier to write software, they want something difficult so they can pretend they have technical skills when they finally kludge a working system together. And, of course, corporations don't want change, so no servers will ever use the new version.

2018-6-1: Original Linux kernel project is abandoned in favor of the new version which does not implement recommendations.

>Linux kernel devs publicly refuse to assist in any committees, because they don't see the problem.

Torvalds was last seen telling some SUSE devs to kill themselves over some perceived annoyance. Why the bum steadfastly refuses to see the error of his own ways is a mystery. Maintaining stability and compatibility is a culture, a way of life. The kernel bums are setting a bad example for everybody else in the Linux world.

Ohio Ham, why are you here? No fun over at Pogson's? Try one of his wife's gang bang parties. She'll be gentle, knowing that you're a virgin from the Australian outback. But don't tell her about your dyslexia. She hates that! But she loves black cock.

Linux desktop finally assured? Sweet! I was worried it'd never happen. Will wipe my drive and install it now!

What distro should I go for? I've heard Ubuntu is kind of cool, but someone told me there's no cube in Ubuntu anymore. I'd really like the cube.

Then I can have Facebook on the 1st side, Twitter on 2nd, Pissed Off Penguins Space Edition on 3rd and YouPorn on fourth. So next time I'm not sure what I should be spending my time on, I'll just spin the cube, Russian roulette style.

The whole WebM/h.264 thing was so hypocritical. There are plenty of parallel cases where there's a freetard-preferred method of doing things, but where browsers will do the patented/non-Aspergers thing anyway because they want the software to work: JPEG and GIF vs. PNG, ordinary HTML vs. the XHTML ("the 'X' stands for 'Xpergers Syndrome'!"), Flash content vs. HTML5, etc. etc. etc.

Besides, I thought freetards were all about Postel's Law -- how does that possibly mesh with insisting that everyone use an inferior video codec?

It was obvious that WebM would lose. Even Google knew that hence why, despite the chest beating, they never dropped H.264 support in Chrome. And WebM was never going to displace it in mobile due to inertia. It's the same as their lame attempt to push WebP that has also gone nowhere.

Take away all of the expensive upgrades. Take away all of the updates and large update files. Take away all of the hype behind the brand name. Remove all of these factors from your operating system and what do you have? The not-so-obvious answer is Slackerware.

Slackerware is an open source application that may not be known to many people, but it is a very simply operating system that is free. It doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles that has made Microsoft popular, but it doesn’t need them.

Take away all of the high-quality productivity software. Take away the games. Take away the ease-of-use. Take away all of the driver support. Take away the advances such as prefetching of pages for memory management. Remove all of that and what do you have? The clear answer is Linux.

George Clooney arrested affected me greatly. George Clooney arrested influenced me to read about modern and world events, and kick started my interest in politics. It changed my world, seeing as I grew up with constant news coverage of George Clooney arrested, and political conflict.

George Clooney arrested has influenced me to read about timely world events.

In addition to reading about world events, George Clooney arrested caused me to become interested in politics. I began to enjoy learning and reading about politics and government.

George Clooney arrested influenced me literarily, but it has also changed America, which is my world.

George Clooney arrested has, and will continue to influence me and the way I read, think and act.

only slightly since they still seem to think that Loonix desktop fail is still due to lack of marketing.

You know, if the "marketing" weren't so negative at the end of the 90s, Linux would have a higher chance.

Back then I tried Linux, and wasn't that impressed with it, especially considering all the praise it got in the tech press at that time.. but I was still willing to give it a go as a hobbyist sort of thing, since I also ran BeOS at the time.

Then I met the "community".. It was all RTFM NOOB! or "nuke M$! GATES IS EBIL!" crazy talk. Visiting those freetard forums and sites for the first time was like entering some sort of creepy cult. I am pretty sure I wasn't the only one with this impression, since you had to scout the forums and newsgroups a lot to get your shit somewhat working.

Linux had a dreamstart in 1998/99, it was hyped by the press and tech community like the greatest thing ever and got VC funds like no tomorrow. And the crazy and hateful community fucked it all up.

The excuse for this focusing on trivialities is the media will put on whatever gets the best ratings, but maybe it's because they lack the imagination to commentate on anything important. They just present the establishment view, within the dominant ideology, then move on.

But then when there's actually a platform where people can watch whatever the fuck they like, Youtube for example, they still watch utter shit; so maybe I'm wrong.

I like the implication that hiring Linus would have completely killed Linux and no-one else would have stepped in to work on it instead.

But then if he hadn't implied that, he couldn't have then insinuated Apple's actions were to cynically destroy the Linux project instead of just hiring someone they thought was pretty good at kernel development.

If you thought that comment somehow enlightehen me, I will try to form a sentence for your small mind, that no, it didn`t. I found it to be severly unintelligent, and you only made me think of you as another ignorant poster on the internet. Please refrain from posting such trash to me in the future. Unless ofcourse you want to be an annoying hellcultivator, and make me enjoy the tought of people like you being killed in Iran. I hope you understand.

The new Amiga Mini is powered by Linux. Is there anything Linux can't do? Such on that winbreds!

Gosh, speak of the devil. We were just talking about Amiga on the previous comments section the other day.

The main question here is: why didn't Commodore just use a PowerPC CPU in the thing? Then they could have actually put the Amiga OS on it and it would really be an Amiga.

...Oh, I see. They don't actually own the Amiga name or OS any more, and they've even been sued for misusing their license. So this ripoff of the Mac Mini is just an attempt to thumb their nose at the people who actually own the name. I bet they get taken to court and have to rename the thing within a couple of months.

(Not that it really matters; they're going to sell about 10 of them. Anyone who has that kind of money to burn on a mini-Linux box is going to realize that they can buy a Mac Mini and upgrade it to the same RAM and drive specs, then install Linux on it, and save something like $1000.)

Yeah, I think Apple dodged a bullet there. Torvalds would have been against all the things which Apple does right (industrial design, standardized hardware, mostly-sensible defaults), while not particularly offering any assistance to them in ways they do things wrong (pretty much everything about how they approach the business market). Either he would have driven away the key people like Jonathan Ives, or he would have been the sort of person who creates security leaks because he hates management. He also probably would have been fired after a couple of years.

Apple without Torvalds has been massively successful. Unless you can imagine some way in which Torvalds would actually have made them more successful, then hiring him would have been a mistake.

It's a bit of a mystery that Linux users are often ex-Amigans, because Linux and Amiga are totally different in almost every respect, united only by Microsoft hate. But there you have it... not even "it runs Linux" is enough to make up for misuse of the Amiga brand name.

Also why do you imagine Linus would have had any say over hardware design? He'd be a kernel developer and I'm pretty sure they have no say over product design since that would be rather stupid when it's not their expertise.

You do realize that Linux uses Macs, correct? If he didn't appreciate those things it's unlikely he'd buy their computers.

Last I heard, he runs Linux on a MacBook Air. The MacBook Air is unusual in that for years Apple's economies of scale have pushed the price down below what it costs most other laptop makers to make a subnotebook of that type. (There were some news stories a while back about how other manufacturers, like Acer and Dell, were begging Intel to give them a special subsidy on their portable CPUs -- which Intel eventually did -- so they could "compete" with Apple.) Torvalds got his MacBook before those discounts started.

In other words, Torvalds isn't using a Mac because he is okay with Macs, he's using it because it was the cheapest ultrabook he could find which wasn't made of 0.5mm plastic. He's a freetard at heart.

Also why do you imagine Linus would have had any say over hardware design? He'd be a kernel developer and I'm pretty sure they have no say over product design since that would be rather stupid when it's not their expertise.

You have obviously never worked in either a large corporation or a government. There are lots of ways to interfere with the operations of things you aren't supposed to have any control over, if you're given enough authority over something else. Particularly if you wouldn't mind being fired very much.

Strategy #1: wait until a meeting where it is absolutely necessary for everyone -- including you -- to sign off on something immediately, and which is being attended by the person in charge of the thing you want to control. Refuse to discuss the actual business of the meeting until after "your" issue has been settled, and refuse to budge in any way from your stance on "your" issues. You will become hated by everyone, but the other people in the meeting will eventually unite on your side because it's the only way they will ever get out of the meeting.

Strategy #2 (applicable to how Torvalds would have been hired): when prototyping is going on, new code will be needed to support the hardware. Write obfuscated code which will detect the hardware choices you don't like (say, for example, lower-powered CPUs in order to make sleeker designs) and make the code do useless extra work on those systems.

Oh, and if things don't go your way, leak as much information about prototypes and upcoming OS features as possible via anonymous e-mail, blogs, Twitter, etc. If they figure out who it was and fire you, you can pretend you're some kind of hacker hero instead of a disgruntled jerk.

What is this Amiga everybody keeps talking about? Is it another obscure OS like Linux?

(Yes, I know this is a troll. But it's fun to answer this kind of question.)

Amiga is the proprietary equivalent to Linux: an also-ran ripoff which refuses to die. The main difference is that where Linux is notorious for getting ported to any piece of hardware which has a CPU, Amiga started off on Motorola 68k CPUs, and now only runs on PowerPC CPUs. Since basically nobody uses PowerPC any more now that Apple left*, it is incompatible with just about everything.

*PowerPC is based on IBM's "Power" CPUs, and was developed by the AIM Alliance: Apple, IBM, and Motorola. Motorola no longer makes CPUs (spun off to Freescale), and Apple gave up after IBM basically said "you know what? We aren't really that interested in making these chips any good, after all". If it weren't for the fact that the CPU market keeps using chips long after they have been superseded -- you can still get CPUs designed in the 1970s, if you want -- the PowerPC family would probably go away soon.

I know it sounds mad, but "destroying Linux" sounds more credible to me for hiring Torvalds than having him as a technical consultant or anything like it.

Linux is a kludge and far from an example of good design. Apple was wise taking BSD as the underpinning for OS X and not Linux (that would be pretty iffy with the GPL anyway).

If you want a good programmer, it would make far more sense taking one of the BSD guys, especially in 2000.

Linux had the hype going for it though, and the hype was in such a swing in 2000 that back then it looked almost as if Linux would bury all other alternatives to Windows, including Mac. (That's pretty ironic - Linux actually strenghtened Microsoft in a way, because, besides Mac, it completely killed or helped to kill everything non-MS, like commercial UNIX. It also helped bury BeOS by outhyping it and fuming freetards didn't help by calling BeOS and any other commercial Windows competitor as "evil") So taking this threat out sounds more credible, not to mention the prestige having Linus on board and taking having some freetard hype for you company that way as well.

I don't usually rag on Mac users, being one, but go look at the comments thread, particularly the second page of it, for this page:

Apple's products have always been better than their competition. But they did nearly go bankrupt in the 90's, didn't they? So it can't be just the products.

O RLY? As late as 1992, Apple was still manufacturing a Mac which (other than being able to accommodate more RAM) was basically still the original 1984 128k Mac (the Mac Classic). And the 1990s were notoriously the period during which Apple started to sell the same exact computer with different names printed on the front (the Quadra 605, LC 475, Performa 475, and Performa 476 are identical). Plus, during the late 1990s they briefly tried to go after the beige box market; I forget the model number, but there's one 1990s-era Mac which has exposed sharp metal edges, which would be unthinkable from Apple either pre-1990 or post-2000.

(That being said, I think some of the commenters have it right on that page: the good bits of HP got spun off into Agilent, and now they're just another race-to-the-bottom beige-box manufacturer. And their printers have likewise turned to crap.)

Except Apple doesn't work that way. So your imagined scenarios have about zero chance to ever have been able to happen. All any of that would have amounted to, even assuming Linus would have done these things which is questionable to begin with, would have been him being promptly fired.

Oh, and if things don't go your way, leak as much information about prototypes and upcoming OS features as possible via anonymous e-mail, blogs, Twitter, etc. If they figure out who it was and fire you, you can pretend you're some kind of hacker hero instead of a disgruntled jerk.

Except Apple doesn't work that way. So your imagined scenarios have about zero chance to ever have been able to happen. All any of that would have amounted to, even assuming Linus would have done these things which is questionable to begin with, would have been him being promptly fired.

Actually, Apple does work that way. Jobs was famous for short-circuiting that sort of process, but that doesn't mean the software and hardware devs weren't meeting to settle details.

Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can't stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

If you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace 'my kids' with 'sales people on the road' if you think your main customers are businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place.

Well, Linus doesn't exactly excel at rhetoric. Linus is so boring and mundane on his blog, it hurts.

Say what you want about Stallman or Eric S, but their stuff at least befuddles you and makes you go "WTF!"

Linus' stuff on the other hand puts you to sleep. And his thoughts on computing seem to be random rants wihout any greater meaning.

I can understand why Stallman is pissed off about the "GNU/Linux" issue. This loonie spent the greater part of his life as "iGNUcius" and eating toe jam, and then some boring standard kiddo from Finland comes around and gets all the fame just because his quickly hacked knock-off kernel was released at the right time on the right place.

If the bum does his own job well, then he can probably start criticizing others, but he is making a mess of that kernel. (The way he rails against having to keep the interfaces stable for the proprietary software companies, you can tell the bum lacks perspective.)

>This loonie spent the greater part of his life as "iGNUcius" and eating toe jam, and then some boring standard kiddo from Finland comes around and gets all the fame just because his quickly hacked knock-off kernel was released at the right time on the right place.

It's a pity Stallman did a lot more advocacy than coding. From all accounts, he is a decent programmer. He may have finished Hurd if he stuck with it.

Someone asks on Slashdot what's the best virtual desktop program to use for Windows. Captain Aspergers says: hurr hurr, use Linux. Though honestly, I'm not sure why the guy asked on such a looney site that question anyway.

The suit, which seeks class-action status, alleges that the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant deceived its users on what was going on when it combined privacy policies for about 60 products into one.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan by David Nisenbaum, Pedro Marti and Allison C. Weiss on behalf of Google and Android users who signed up for any Google user account from Aug. 19, 2004, to Feb. 29, 2012, and continued to use a Google account on or after March 1, 2012, when Google's new privacy policy went into effect.

Android, Google's popular smartphone and tablet operating system, is made available to gadget makers at no cost but requires a Google account to use many of the features found in the software.

Indeed, i was surprized by Nexuiz too. The thing was under GPL. If the current version includes pieces of code from the last GPL version, then any contributors who contributed to the making of those pieces of code can sue. See how a VLC contributor asked Apple to take down VLC from the iOS app store, because Apple's terms of use conflict with the GPL.

My guess are that if the latest version of Nexuiz includes pieces of code from the latest GPL version, those contributors are waiting for Nexuiz to become popular and sue later.

PS: My real problem with Nexuiz is that the characters are ugly. I don't need a game to have a girl with DDs as playable character to play it, but Nexuiz playable characters are ugly.